Making Sense - Sam Harris - #192 — A Conversation with Paul Bloom

00:00:00.000 Welcome to the Making Sense Podcast. This is Sam Harris. Okay, I just want to point out that it's

00:00:24.560 taken a global emergency to cause me to change my music back to the old music. Many of you will

00:00:30.200 be relieved and considered a fair trade global pandemic for getting rid of the new music and the

00:00:36.820 newer music and reverting back to the classic coke of the old music. So apologies for the

00:00:42.860 discombobulation. We will work out our music problems as the end times proceed. But now I'm

00:00:50.100 back here with my friend and partner in social distancing, Paul Bloom. Paul, thank you for

00:00:57.300 coming back. And it's good to be back. I like the new music. I know you're getting a lot of pushback

00:01:02.460 on Twitter, but I enjoyed it. Oh yeah, the amount of hate is unbelievable. I mean, I like it too,

00:01:07.520 but even I recognize that there was a total mismatch between its upbeat vibe and some of

00:01:14.980 the topics I was beginning to cover. And I just, coronavirus aside, the idea of dropping that

00:01:20.660 music against nuclear war or child pornography or whatever else I had come in, it just seemed wrong.

00:01:27.240 So, you know, I've known you for a while and I've always wondered what you would do to cross the line

00:01:30.960 and it turned out to be the music. Yes, the most controversial misstep I've ever taken.

00:01:35.060 That's right. So are you social distancing?

00:01:38.500 Yeah, I am pretty good at it at this point, I must say. It did not take long for me to snap into

00:01:47.160 gear here. And this has been such a strange experience because, I mean, everyone must be

00:01:54.260 experiencing this. At whatever point they began to take this seriously or began to notice the culture

00:02:00.480 taking this seriously, the experience for all of us is of time compressing in this amazing way where,

00:02:08.500 you know, three days, much less a week, seems like an eternity. I mean, you and I recorded our last

00:02:13.080 podcast, I think, we released it about 17 days ago on February 28th. And that now seems like a

00:02:19.260 different period in human history. I think we hardly mentioned COVID. Things have changed so quickly.

00:02:26.500 Well, I think we had recorded that podcast a few days earlier, like the 24th. For my podcast with

00:02:32.900 Nicholas Christakis, I went back and reconstructed my own psychological timeline because I was

00:02:38.400 interested to see when the dominoes began to fall for me and how out of sync I was with the culture

00:02:47.060 and with many of my friends. It was on the 27th that I just, you know, pulled the ripcord. So, you know,

00:02:53.660 it was right after we recorded that podcast. So I must have been thinking about it then. But there's so

00:02:58.600 many sources of stress here and we can talk about them. But one thing that has been personally

00:03:05.160 stressful is just to be early on this. You know, I can sort of almost set my watch by it. I've been

00:03:12.280 essentially like a week ahead of where society seems to be at. And there's something really toxic

00:03:18.960 about trying to convince the people in your life to take something that you're taking very seriously,

00:03:26.240 more seriously.

00:03:27.820 So do you feel that now people are on the same page as you? I mean, my sense is they're about a week ago.

00:03:33.400 So people are in all different directions. Now, for the most part, I feel everybody is taking this

00:03:38.420 extremely seriously, very worried about the Italian model, very worried about where we'll be two weeks

00:03:43.160 from now. Do you feel that yourself?

00:03:45.820 Well, with some very prominent and galling exceptions, there are people, you know, who privately are not

00:03:53.320 taking it seriously enough. And I'm having to essentially attempt an exorcism on their brains,

00:03:57.980 you know, just one-to-one on, you know, with a phone call. And then there are people, you know,

00:04:03.220 who have a public posture who are not taking it seriously, who I'm kind of back-channeling and

00:04:09.040 receiving a lot of pushback. I mean, in some cases, total pushback. And it's very frustrating because,

00:04:15.020 you know, some of these people have enormous public platforms and it's just socially irresponsible

00:04:20.400 not to have your facts straight at this point. And yeah, so some of this has been happening behind

00:04:26.080 the scenes. And it actually connects with a conversation you and I were having last time

00:04:31.220 around loyalty and the obligation or pseudo-obligation to treat friends differently.

00:04:38.000 I noticed that if there's someone who's wrong in public about this, who I don't have a prior

00:04:42.900 relationship with, certainly not a friendship, I'm much more disposed to just kind of message at

00:04:50.040 them, however harshly, in public. Whereas if they're already a friend, I feel like, okay,

00:04:55.960 I got to go behind the scenes and try to get them to change their minds, you know, in private and

00:05:01.060 then message something differently in public. And, you know, now that I'm confronting this

00:05:05.200 in a pretty big way, I don't actually know what the right answer is. And do you have intuitions about

00:05:10.260 that? It's a hard case. I mean, I think there's a middle ground. I mean, I've argued with friends

00:05:15.960 of mine on Twitter. I've argued with you on Twitter about issues where you could kind of intellectually

00:05:21.080 disagree. And if it's all in sort of, you know, a positive atmosphere and with respect, that's fine.

00:05:27.680 But this is a funny case because you want to be telling your friend here that he or she is doing

00:05:34.380 something seriously wrong and, you know, risking people's lives, risking people's health.

00:05:40.840 And I could understand the reluctance to do that in public. It'd be better if you could persuade them

00:05:45.820 in private. Yeah. Yeah. I've certainly made a solid attempt and come up short there for reasons

00:05:53.560 that are just completely disconcerting. I mean, I actually have no theory of mind for why certain

00:05:58.800 people don't get that this is a big deal. I mean, there are obviously some memes that are doing

00:06:04.720 real damage to people's thinking here. And maybe we should just talk about why it's hard to grasp

00:06:11.540 this problem and, you know, why it was hard to grasp it early and to change one's behavior.

00:06:17.100 I mean, there's one meme that I think has really been damaging is any analogy drawn to the flu.

00:06:23.040 You have people saying, well, the flu kills 50,000 people a year in the United States.

00:06:27.760 If we were paying attention to the flu on this kind of granular level, we'd be terrified too. We'd be in a

00:06:34.720 perpetual state of terror and no one would leave their houses and people would be insisting that

00:06:40.960 schools should be closed. But we don't do that. And we're right not to do that. So this whole

00:06:45.540 coronavirus thing is insane. And there are people who are stuck on that bad analogy who just don't

00:06:52.700 understand. I mean, yes, flu would be appropriately terrifying if every one of us were going to get

00:06:58.360 it in a single month in the United States and we were going to crash our healthcare system,

00:07:02.820 right? I mean, flu is also a big deal, but this is also by, you know, any rational estimation at this

00:07:10.500 point, considerably worse to get than the flu. Now, whether it's six times worse or 10 times worse

00:07:16.240 or 20 times worse, we don't know. But, you know, anyone who thinks that if you're under 70 or even

00:07:24.560 under 50 and have no comorbidities, you're just going to sail through this thing without a problem.

00:07:30.900 That is not what we're hearing from the front lines. And we're not even at the point now where

00:07:36.420 we're getting decent data on the lasting impairments among the people who are, quote,

00:07:42.340 recovered from this thing. I mean, there's definitely some reports of lasting lung damage and heart

00:07:47.940 damage. And so there's just no question the analogy to flu is a bad one. And yet people keep making it.

00:07:55.960 And imagine that it's true that for, imagine it turns out to be true that for young people, say

00:08:01.480 under 50, it will not cause much damage. It'll be experienced like a bad case of the flu and then

00:08:07.280 you get better. Still, it seems to be bizarrely cruel to be indifferent to the suffering of older

00:08:14.220 people. I mean, you might, you could say to somebody simply, don't you have anybody over the age of 60 who

00:08:19.680 you love, a parent, a grandparent, anybody who's, who's compromised in some way, who's not as healthy

00:08:25.600 as you, or you could simply say, don't even, you don't have to imagine whether you have somebody in

00:08:30.720 your life. Can you appreciate that these people's lives matter? And by you getting sick, even if you

00:08:35.920 yourself are willing to take on the risk, the harm you can do to other people is, should be a factor

00:08:42.280 in dictating your, your life choices? Yeah. And I think Nicholas Christakis made this point where

00:08:49.240 if only out of, you know, altruistic, positively social motives, if you just understood that you

00:08:57.960 at your age in your cohort were just destined to be a carrier of this thing, you know, you still have

00:09:03.960 to worry about, you know, every old person you are going to come in contact with. When do you decide

00:09:09.220 to behave normally around your parents or your grandparents? If you're an asymptomatic carrier,

00:09:15.120 you're just rolling the dice with them, you know, with their lives. So it's something to take

00:09:19.060 seriously, even if you were guaranteed not to suffer much from this. So you, you've been talking

00:09:24.480 to experts and actually I got to say that the episodes you had with Amesh Adalja and my friend,

00:09:29.900 Nicholas Christakis have been excellent. I am not an expert on this. I know nothing about it except for

00:09:35.060 the fact I've been reading Twitter nonstop for the last, you know, two weeks, but, but I am interested

00:09:40.920 in the psychology of these things. And there's something about this situation, which it has

00:09:47.120 certain features that make it difficult for us to appreciate. So the causality is funny. We understand

00:09:53.140 that if you are sick and you are, you are, are showing signs of disease and you make contact with me,

00:09:58.780 there's risk and I should, you know, avoid you from that. But basically the way this disease works is

00:10:04.960 you can be perfectly healthy and asymptomatic and contact with you though. It doesn't seem bad

00:10:09.640 is still bad. This disease shows signs of exponential growth and we can look to other

00:10:17.200 countries to see it happening. And that's a difficult concept for us to grasp. We look around,

00:10:21.500 we see everyone's fine. We're all kind of going to restaurants and bars and everything's fine.

00:10:26.000 This disease has no enemy. It's not as if we're dealing with a malevolent agent. We're dealing with

00:10:30.820 this sort of, you know, unfeeling, unconscious virus. And for all of these reasons, we're not

00:10:37.900 really suited to think well about it. You know, we look around, we see everyone's walking around,

00:10:42.440 people are fine. So we assume we're fine. And it's only when we reflect and we look at other countries

00:10:46.960 and we use our, you know, rational capacities, we understand the terrible risks involved.

00:10:52.120 Yeah. But conversely, I mean, this should be the easiest emergency to orient toward. First of all,

00:11:01.860 it's the easiest one to have prepared for in advance because it was guaranteed to happen.

00:11:07.820 I mean, it's literally like, you know, a tornado if you live in Tornado Alley or, you know,

00:11:12.520 an earthquake if you live in California. I mean, this is a point that Bill Gates made,

00:11:16.520 like the threat of a global pandemic that was, you know, highly contagious and, you know, lethal

00:11:23.500 enough to be of real concern, that was guaranteed to happen, right? And this is certainly not as bad

00:11:30.500 as it could be. Whatever the outcome here, literally, even if millions of people die,

00:11:35.600 this is still a dress rehearsal for something that is civilization canceling.

00:11:40.360 That's right. The guy, Adalja, when he spoke with you, kept saying, you know, this is fine. This is

00:11:45.180 not such a big deal. And he said it was clear he was comparing it to some sort of form of bird flu

00:11:50.980 that would kill 60% of people who got it and would ultimately, you know, be a species extinguishing

00:11:57.740 event. So, yeah, it could be a lot worse from that perspective. But when we knew this was going

00:12:03.620 to happen, I mean, this was not, this is not even as hypothetical or as debatable as climate change.

00:12:09.700 There's no alternate argument based on evolutionary principles that xenoviruses aren't going to jump

00:12:17.440 into our species and mutate and, in a matter of time, get worse, right? So, we just knew this was

00:12:24.160 going to happen and yet we didn't prepare. And even when it's happening and we know we are failing to

00:12:31.400 contain the spread and we're seeing this wave crash on the shores of other countries, I mean,

00:12:36.960 even looking at what's happening in Italy, you still have people here denying the reality of

00:12:43.180 this thing. And I mean, like, literally, did you see the photos from kind of the last night at Disney

00:12:48.240 World last night?

00:12:49.580 Yeah. I mean...

00:12:50.440 Yes, I've seen Disney World. I've seen pictures of Florida beaches. I've seen, you know, wild

00:12:55.940 parades and parties.

00:12:57.620 These are images out of a pandemic movie, right? I mean, this is like minute 33 in the pandemic

00:13:04.720 movie. You have just a crowd of doomed imbeciles just fighting their way into the magic kingdom,

00:13:12.080 right? It's just...

00:13:13.580 I mean, it's...

00:13:14.420 So, what do you think is going on with the doomed imbeciles? Do you think it's skepticism

00:13:18.000 about what the government has to say?

00:13:20.620 As I pointed out, I mean, I know some of these imbeciles. Some of them are quite smart.

00:13:24.640 Okay. So, the smart imbeciles, what's up with them? Is it that they're just natural contrarians?

00:13:29.980 Is it that they distrust what the government has to say? Is it a political thing?

00:13:35.200 I don't actually... I mean, there are certain cases where I really do not have a theory of

00:13:39.500 mind. I just think I'm stumped. But in others, you know, as this thing was gathering energy

00:13:45.740 for me in my life, and I noticed that I was out of step with the culture and with the people

00:13:52.200 around me, I noticed there was a marked difference between people who were very online and people

00:13:58.960 who were just not online at all. I mean, like, the people in my life who just have never had a

00:14:02.980 Twitter account, they have a very different information diet and a cadence of getting

00:14:09.660 information on really anything. And, you know, so some of them were just totally oblivious. I mean,

00:14:15.320 literally, I had a, you know, very close friend, very smart guy, well-educated. Basically, he thinks

00:14:21.640 he stays in touch with reality and, you know, looks at the newspaper every day. But he was aghast

00:14:28.080 when I told him that he would be canceling his travel plans at a point when I would have bet my

00:14:33.760 life he was canceling those travel plans. I mean, it's just, there was no way those plans were going

00:14:38.180 to go forward. And literally, it took like an hour of conversation and, you know, sending links and

00:14:42.840 like just trying to get into his head around this. So there are people who are not living in the year

00:14:49.760 2020 on some level with respect to information. But it also cuts both ways, because I think the

00:14:54.700 people who are very online can also get siloed into their preferred echo chamber. And, you know,

00:15:01.740 the way the variable of politics is interacting here is pretty interesting, because this is,

00:15:07.680 when you look at what was happening in Trumpistan, and on some level is still happening,

00:15:12.200 you know, among Trump's fans, they've been so confused that they didn't even change their story

00:15:16.800 once the president changed his. They seem to be denying the gravity of this, even when he's

00:15:21.760 forced to declare it's a national emergency. So it's, yeah, I think it cuts both ways. I think

00:15:28.000 people can really be confused online. But sort of in the normal course of events, I felt that

00:15:34.560 the people who were not on Twitter in particular, just were not getting up to the minute information.

00:15:40.440 And that's a factor, there's a factor which was true, you know, a couple of weeks ago,

00:15:45.220 it's no longer true, which is, it really was siloed politically, which is the liberals, you know,

00:15:50.020 were very concerned about the virus. And the fans of Trump were listening to him to say,

00:15:55.880 this is no big deal, we have it, Lick, don't worry about it. And, you know, to his, you know,

00:16:00.320 his very limited credit, he changed his story. And...

00:16:04.520 Well, I think he probably changed his story. Well, who knows? One major lever in his brain is

00:16:10.960 what happens to the stock market, obviously. So he knew he, at a certain point, he had to message

00:16:15.340 to the market. This was interesting, because this is, this is not an irrational concern. I mean,

00:16:20.840 the steel man version of the other side here is, the panic is going to do more harm than the virus.

00:16:28.340 What you don't want to do is crash the global economy, because that has all kinds of other

00:16:33.840 effects that actually do cost lives, right? People will die because the economy falls apart.

00:16:39.640 If you're going to have a virus that even in the end might kill a million people in the United

00:16:46.200 States, if you can absorb that blow without crashing the U.S. economy, that's much better

00:16:52.400 than crashing it in a panic. And I totally understand that. I mean, I've never been counseling

00:16:59.040 panic. But the problem we've faced at every moment along the way here is that in order to do something

00:17:09.100 that mitigates the problem at all, in order to do anything that flattens the curve, that spares our

00:17:15.040 healthcare system, I mean, even if all of us are destined to get this thing, if most of us can get

00:17:20.120 it once there are effective antiviral treatments, that's a completely different world. The only thing

00:17:24.940 we can do to spread this out over time and contain it at all is to practice what everyone knows now is

00:17:32.040 social distancing. But the paradox here is that in order to do the thing that will actually work

00:17:38.580 at every time point, that thing will seem unreasonable at that time point. The time you

00:17:45.440 need to close the schools is when no one you know is sick yet, right? Precisely the moment where

00:17:52.300 everyone's thinking, oh, come on, we don't even know anyone who's sick. Why close the schools? And so

00:17:57.720 it's just psychologically, it's almost a perfect exploit of our system. I mean, we just can't be

00:18:03.600 strongly motivated at a moment when the very action being counseled seems irrational.

00:18:09.860 And by all accounts, we acted too late. The United States was too late. If we acted a week earlier,

00:18:15.020 two weeks earlier, the situation would be much better coming up in the future. And, you know,

00:18:20.520 nobody knows what it's going to be like two weeks from now. But the irresponsibility of the

00:18:24.560 government in its behavior, and sometimes ongoing irresponsibility, you know, New York was very

00:18:31.120 slow to respond, for instance, at the city level, it's going to have a cost. But, you know, you're

00:18:37.520 right about, so Yale, where I teach, has gone to online teaching, and I'm scrambling to get on top of

00:18:45.420 that. And I'm doing, you know, social distancing and all that. And it's an inconvenience and it's

00:18:50.280 difficulty. But there are so many people for whom this crisis is life devastating, loss of jobs,

00:18:59.020 loss of businesses. You know, in Italy, you don't have funerals for your, you know, people die and

00:19:06.640 they can't get, they can't have funerals. There are people who are separated from their children,

00:19:10.920 from their families. There's, you know, cancellations of weddings, of critical life events.

00:19:16.120 So I think any, you and I are in some way very fortunate that we're insulated from the true

00:19:22.720 errors of this event. But this is, this is going to, this is destroying lives. And, and I just wish

00:19:31.560 we responded quicker. Yeah. And the concern about panic, there was a needle that had to be threaded

00:19:37.740 here. And we still have to thread it. And every day it becomes more important that we do it. But

00:19:44.080 it's not that we need panic, but we did need to be more alarmed than we were earlier. I mean,

00:19:53.300 the analogy I, it comes to mind here is really to wearing a seatbelt. Like, I find that, you know,

00:19:59.640 my anxiety around this pandemic is always at the boundary between where I'm either trying to convince

00:20:06.800 someone that they should take it seriously, or trying to figure out what I and my people in my family

00:20:12.820 in my immediate circle should actually do practically. But once you've figured out what

00:20:17.820 you should do, then there's, there's no need for anxiety anymore. You can dial the anxiety all the

00:20:23.220 way down because it serves no purpose, but it really does serve a purpose when you need to be

00:20:29.100 motivated to figure something out. And so like, for me, it's like in the time when seatbelts were just

00:20:36.160 being adopted, right? And people had to be convinced to wear them and they didn't like them and

00:20:40.520 they wanted to feel, you know, free in the car and they didn't like the feeling of confinement.

00:20:45.040 And I'm sure there were all of these idiotic conversations where, in fact, there was one

00:20:49.300 person in my life about 20 years ago, very close friend, still is a, one of my best friends who did

00:20:55.220 not wear a seatbelt, right? And this is like in the nineties, he was not wearing a seatbelt. He was

00:21:00.280 just a real outlier in my life. I could never convince him to wear a seatbelt. There was no argument

00:21:05.960 that would work. And then he flipped his car and got needlessly injured. Perhaps he would have

00:21:11.600 gotten injured anyway, but he, you know, he was not wearing a seatbelt and he, you can picture what,

00:21:16.020 what a car rolling over does to you when you're, you know, free to bounce around in it. And he

00:21:21.060 recovered from his injuries, which is great, but he, he was injured enough to reflect on the

00:21:26.800 implications of being loose in a car at speed. So now, you know, ever after has worn a seatbelt.

00:21:31.260 So there are some people who actually do need to be shown the horrific pictures of car accidents,

00:21:40.060 right? I mean, to get motivated to wear a seatbelt. But once you're motivated, once you understand

00:21:44.900 the utility, none of us have to feel anxiety when we get behind the wheel of a car to motivate us

00:21:52.420 to clip in our seatbelt. That gesture now is an automaticity. And I think the same can be true of

00:21:59.820 a response to a crisis like this. I mean, once you figure out what you should do, well, then you can

00:22:05.740 just do that thing. And all this ambient anxiety can be dialed down, but it's totally appropriate

00:22:11.460 to feel it when you're just basically uncertain about what you should do. And you get, you have

00:22:16.260 mixed messages and, and you can't get, you know, your friends and family on the same page. Anyway,

00:22:20.840 that's how I see it. So I mean, I think, you know, anxiety, you know, continuous anxiety is

00:22:24.940 obviously counterproductive. And we have a significant mental health challenge on our hands

00:22:30.600 when you have anxious people living in isolation and watching the stock market bounce around and

00:22:37.680 unable to work. Virus aside, this would be a very big deal for society.

00:22:43.860 Yeah, people seeing their life savings drop and drop and drop and drop. And of course, things,

00:22:48.420 things are happening very quickly. I mean, I'm in Toronto now, and Canadian prime minister a few

00:22:53.460 hours ago announced that Canada would basically be closing its doors to anybody who wasn't Canadian

00:22:58.200 or for a short period, American. And so, you know, what governments do and how they respond and what

00:23:06.900 the restrictions will be on your behavior is a constant source of anxiety. How long this will

00:23:11.300 last? I mean, in some way, you're right from a sort of, I don't know, the Buddhist perspective that

00:23:16.680 once a decision has been made, there's no point to being anxious. Yet, nonetheless, you know,

00:23:22.760 it's an anxious time. There's another aspect to this, by the way, you mentioned threading the

00:23:27.460 needle. Neither one of us is a fan of Donald Trump. And initially, what he did was he seemed,

00:23:34.880 you know, relatively indifferent and unconcerned about the crisis. But there's another way I always

00:23:39.500 worried he might go. And it wouldn't surprise me if he goes this way in the future, which is to rampant

00:23:45.760 xenophobia, directing hatred against foreigners, against immigrants, and so on. And besides being,

00:23:53.460 you know, morally terrible, this will make the crisis worse. If people, for instance, if illegal

00:23:59.680 immigrants, or even, you know, legal immigrants don't have access to health care, are afraid to

00:24:07.500 enter the system, the situation will get much worse and not better.

00:24:11.280 Yeah, I guess I don't really see the basis for that. Because, you know, if anything,

00:24:15.240 Mexico should be trying to keep us out, right? I mean, once the scope of this contagion becomes

00:24:22.220 more obvious, it won't seem like this is, you know, coming from Asia, or I mean, it's now we think it's

00:24:28.740 from Trump's point of view, it's more coming from Europe, right? So it's really just, it's a human

00:24:34.600 problem. I don't see how he gets, well, I'll tell you what, in the future, an appropriate demand

00:24:41.100 which could well be spun as xenophobic, but shouldn't be, will be a demand on China to close

00:24:49.680 down these wet markets, because they actually are akin to bioterrorism. It's negligence that is so

00:24:58.500 obscene that it is almost an act of war. I mean, they are spawning these viruses. Anyone who's

00:25:04.600 playing with a bat in one hand and a duck in the other is just a fucking terrorist at this point.

00:25:11.100 Whether they know it or not. So we have to clamp down on that. And I got to assume the Chinese

00:25:17.680 government will, for all their authoritarian charm, they will see the wisdom of doing that. And it

00:25:24.180 almost doesn't matter how they do it, right? It's like, whoever's insisting that they need to play

00:25:28.200 with bats needs to be dealt with in China. Okay, well, no argument there. But I'm not as confident

00:25:35.180 as you that Trump can't figure out a way to make use of this crisis.

00:25:40.080 I certainly think he can make use of it in some horrible way. In fact, there's some report that he

00:25:45.780 was trying to get a German drug manufacturer to move to the U.S. to produce a vaccine exclusively for

00:25:52.860 the U.S. Even for Trump, that seems so... I read the same reports. It seems so cartoonishly evil.

00:25:58.520 Yes, I know. That only we would have the vaccine. It's like supervillain evil.

00:26:02.980 And I'm going to be skeptical about that. But it wouldn't surprise me if Trump just used this for

00:26:08.500 more build-the-wall rhetoric, even though blaming Mexico for this is bizarre. But it wouldn't surprise

00:26:15.980 me. Obviously, there's some data on how unlikely we are to be able to contain the spread of a virus

00:26:23.880 by stopping travel. But insofar as we have better information, it seems to me, that does become more

00:26:31.120 and more plausible. I think internationally, we do need to be agile on that front. And without any

00:26:38.700 imputation of xenophobia, we just have to say, okay, no flights for 10 days. Let's see what the hell's

00:26:45.020 going on in that country of yours. So that was the one move he made, which was, I believe, spun as

00:26:51.140 xenophobic initially when he made it, although some of the spin turned out to be false memes

00:26:57.400 circulated on Twitter. I think there was a fake tweet from Chuck Schumer saying that this is more

00:27:02.420 racism from Trump. But I did support him canceling the flights from China, just on the assumption that

00:27:08.280 it might work. Now, it obviously didn't. And the rest of his messaging was so appalling and insane

00:27:14.860 that he did much more damage than one might expect.

00:27:18.580 No, I could see in the future Trump exploiting this, but I don't think travel restrictions to date

00:27:24.520 have been particularly xenophobic. You know, like I just said, Justin Trudeau is doing the same thing

00:27:29.220 for Canada, actually much stricter than what the United States has. And, you know, nobody sees this as a

00:27:34.860 xenophobic move. It's just designed to reduce spread. And so I've heard talk that there may be some

00:27:42.680 domestic travel restrictions in the United States. It's a possibility. And it's not clear that's a bad

00:27:47.720 idea.

00:27:49.320 No, no. I mean, the painful reality of this is that this is a massive coordination problem. If we could

00:27:57.020 all just agree to stay home for something like three weeks, we could actually extinguish this thing.

00:28:05.100 I mean, leave aside, I guess it's possible that people who already have it could be contagious for much

00:28:11.480 longer than we might fear. I mean, I guess that's possible. You know, I don't think we understand the

00:28:16.980 disease enough now to rule that out. But, you know, assuming this acts like many other viruses,

00:28:23.900 we could just all hole up for three weeks and have this burn itself out. And yet we seem absolutely

00:28:31.240 incapable of doing that. And for that reason, who knows when life returns to normal and at what cost.

00:28:37.440 And the terrifying thing could be in two weeks, three weeks, we could be Italy. We could have our

00:28:42.480 hospitals overrun and people could be dying for lack of medical care. So that's the big worry.

00:28:49.440 Yeah. And that's barring some fairly heroic social distancing. I think that it's reasonable to expect

00:28:57.300 that at this point. So I mean, certainly in parts of the U.S., I mean, in major cities,

00:29:03.400 we've all learned a lot in the last few weeks. I mean, I had no idea that we only had 2.8 hospital

00:29:09.760 beds for every thousand people in this country. And it's actually much lower than other countries.

00:29:14.680 And it's much lower than Italy, for instance. And the fact that our hospitals already function at 65%

00:29:20.400 capacity, it would be great if at tolerable cost, we learned every actionable lesson to learn from this.

00:29:28.700 Just imagine actually becoming more robust in the face of pandemic as a result of this and realizing

00:29:36.520 that our healthcare system needs to be reformulated. And I mean, there's so many things that are kind

00:29:41.380 of breaking through now, universal basic income, universal healthcare. It's just...

00:29:46.700 Mitt Romney just suggested sending a check to every American.

00:29:49.180 And it's not a bad idea. I think it's much better, much more effective and much, much

00:29:55.500 better than some sort of tax fiddling. Because if you send a check to every American, it'll mean more

00:30:01.100 to poor Americans and rich Americans. While if you do stuff with the payroll tax, it has the opposite

00:30:06.000 effect.

00:30:06.940 Yeah. Except I don't see in this case how it truly reboots the economy. Because if we're avoiding

00:30:14.300 a potentially lethal virus and are wise to, and therefore don't want to go to restaurants,

00:30:21.060 just giving people money to go to restaurants is not going to get them to go to restaurants.

00:30:25.540 So the restaurant business is going to suffer no matter how big that check is, except for it'll

00:30:32.360 help the people who are not working at their restaurant jobs.

00:30:35.640 And who can't pay their rent.

00:30:37.620 Yeah.

00:30:38.500 So in some way, you've answered a question I was going to ask you, which is, it's been going

00:30:42.680 around Twitter, people have been asking each other, so what are the positive effects of this

00:30:47.140 event, assuming we make it through? And one answer you gave, which I think is the immediate answer

00:30:52.300 and is the right answer, is that it's a dress rehearsal for the next one, which could be much

00:30:57.420 more serious. So we could go through some difficult times, but if we learn from it and know how to

00:31:02.100 respond intelligently and appropriately and prepare, then when the next bird flu comes,

00:31:08.880 we could be prepared. So that would be a plus side.

00:31:11.320 Can you think about it?

00:31:13.420 Yeah. Well, there are many, personally and collectively. Just collectively, this is a wake-up

00:31:20.960 call on so many fronts. I mean, the idea that we don't want expertise anymore, right? The idea that

00:31:26.560 we can just wing it with a reality TV show star and his buddies in charge of everything. You have to

00:31:33.160 imagine many people for whom the downside there was just an abstraction. Many, many people are tired

00:31:40.460 of winning, I would say, at this point. And just take specific examples like, you know, the anti-vax

00:31:48.060 movement, right? I mean, just think of how nice it would be to have a vaccine for coronavirus right

00:31:53.240 now. The anti-vax people are very quiet now.

00:31:55.920 Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I don't know which has been harmed more, the cruise ship industry or the anti-vax

00:32:01.300 movement. And I don't know which recovers first, but that argument is over, right? And, you know,

00:32:06.600 it should be felt to be over. And the indecency of it when it resurfaces should carry more opprobrium

00:32:14.160 than it has in the past. But also just understanding that there are problems we have that are global

00:32:20.480 in scale for which there really is only a global solution. We can't be America first for global

00:32:27.060 problems. And that lesson has to become indelible. The flip side of this epiphany, however, is that

00:32:34.320 given how hard we've found it to be to convince ourselves that this pandemic that is just crashing

00:32:43.120 down on us is worth paying attention to, I don't know how we get our heads straight around climate

00:32:49.940 change. Just imagine if this were climate change, right? And you had reports out of Italy that climate

00:32:57.440 change has arrived and the hospitals are full and they're having to triage patients and deciding whether

00:33:04.180 a 45-year-old with two kids should live over a 55-year-old with three kids. And that's all due to

00:33:10.940 climate change. And, you know, we can track its progress across the Atlantic and it's coming to

00:33:17.740 New York and we still can't decide whether to pay attention to it. That's the situation we're in

00:33:24.560 right now. And yet, you know, climate change is this multi-year, multi-decade abstraction.

00:33:31.820 If our psychologies are unprepared to deal with this, as they seem to be, at least in part,

00:33:36.540 they are grossly unprepared for climate change. Because, you know, here we have to be able to

00:33:41.180 think forward to two weeks and see, here's who we'll be in two weeks if we don't act.

00:33:47.400 You know, for climate change, I mean, it's 20 years, 10 years, 20 years. And it's difficult.

00:33:53.120 It's a difficult coordination problem. There's this line that I think Ronald Reagan was actually

00:33:58.360 the first to say, but it's sort of a standard social psychology thing, which is what will bring

00:34:02.580 the world together as, you know, alien invasion. Aliens attack, we'd all come together, we'd have

00:34:08.200 a common enemy. And, you know, that might be right. There's some, you know, social psychology

00:34:14.680 work suggesting a common enemy really does bring people together. But I don't think the virus cuts

00:34:20.560 it. It doesn't seem to be having that effect. And climate change doesn't cut it either. I think

00:34:25.320 the common enemy actually really has to be an enemy, something, an intelligent, malevolent creature

00:34:30.600 we could fight against. These causal properties of biology and physics don't seem to inspire us in

00:34:39.740 the same way. Yeah. The time course is really hard to get your mind around when you think about a

00:34:44.800 slower moving problem than this and our inability to be motivated by it. That's pretty sobering.

00:34:50.960 That's a nice way to put it. It's too slow moving. It's too slow moving. And again, I think,

00:34:57.360 put it this way, I think the people, whoever coined the term, the war on cancer, was kind of a genius.

00:35:04.820 Wars motivate us. Wars excite us. Wars drive us. And that's a useful metaphor. Now, it's not as

00:35:14.300 simple as say, let's have the war on, you know, COVID-19. But if we could think more that way,

00:35:19.600 we'd probably respond better. Whatever the remedy is here, it's going to be recognizing once and for

00:35:28.720 all how the free market is not optimizing for responsiveness to certain enormous problems,

00:35:37.320 right? And the fact that we were noticing that our supply of mission-critical things is running low

00:35:44.140 already, right? I mean, just the ventilators. We're not going to have enough ventilators,

00:35:48.280 right? And we get all of our drugs from China, right? I mean, just imagine somebody was,

00:35:53.860 we don't happen to be at war with China at the moment, but someone drew the analogy to, you know,

00:35:58.740 just imagine if we outsource the production of all of our bullets, you know, all of our ammunition to

00:36:05.280 China, right? And then we get into a war with China and we expect them to supply us with rounds for

00:36:09.980 our guns. I mean, it's just ridiculous that we don't have the infrastructure to produce specific

00:36:16.560 life-saving things that we know we're going to need. So we have to figure that out. And the idea

00:36:21.740 that we don't want big government meddling in our lives at these points is just insane. I mean,

00:36:27.900 so the libertarian fan fiction that everyone has been reading in Silicon Valley for the last

00:36:34.300 30 years, right? You know, all the devotees of Ayn Rand have to ream this out of their heads. You

00:36:40.980 need a government big enough to handle problems like this. And... Pandemics turn us all into socialists.

00:36:47.160 Yeah. Yeah. You know, and I've actually seen, I've seen some people on Twitter who are

00:36:51.500 pretty libertarian and everything in there. This is, this is, this has been a...

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Making Sense - Sam Harris - March 17, 2020

#192 — A Conversation with Paul Bloom

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